1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to digital communication systems, and more particularly to a robust timing offset compensation scheme for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the rapidly growing demand for cellular, mobile radio and other wireless transmission services, there has been an increasing interest in exploiting various technologies to provide reliable, secure, and efficient wireless communications. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is well known as a highly spectral efficient transmission scheme capable of dealing with severe channel impairment encountered in a mobile environment. OFDM was previously adopted for wireless local area network (WLAN) applications as part of the IEEE 802.11a standard in the 5 GHz frequency band. Furthermore, the IEEE 802.11 g standard approved in June of 2003 also adopted OFDM as a mandatory part for a further high-speed physical layer (PHY) extension to the 802.11b standard in the 2.4 GHz band.
The basic idea of OFDM is to divide the available spectrum into several sub-channels (subcarriers). By making all sub-channels narrowband, they experience almost flat fading, which makes equalization very simple. In order to obtain a high spectral efficiency, the frequency responses of the sub-channels are overlapping and orthogonal. This orthogonality can be completely maintained by introducing a guard interval, even though the signal passes through a time-dispersive channel. A guard interval (GI) is a copy of the last part of an OFDM symbol which is pre-appended to the transmitted symbol. This plays a decisive role in avoiding inter-symbol and inter-carrier interference.
OFDM can largely eliminate the effects of inter-symbol interference (ISI) for high-speed transmission in highly dispersive channels by separating a single high speed bit stream into a multiplicity of much lower speed bit streams each modulating a different subcarrier. However, OFDM is known to be vulnerable to synchronization errors due to the narrow spacing between subcarriers. The most important difficulty when implementing OFDM systems is that of achieving timing, phase and frequency synchronization between the transmitter and the receiver. In general, mismatch between transmitter and receiver oscillators contributes a non-zero carrier frequency offset in a received OFDM signal. Transient behavior of the frequency synthesizer is another source of the frequency offset. OFDM signals are very susceptible to the frequency offset which causes a loss of orthogonality between the OFDM subcarriers and results in inter-carrier interference (ICI) and bit error rate (BER) deterioration of the receiver. Similarly, phase noise arising from oscillators also introduces ICI. In addition, both frequency offset and phase noise cause phase variation so that phase tracking is required for coherent detection. Unlike the frequency offset and phase noise, as stated above, timing errors may incur inter-symbol interference (ISI) in addition to ICI. If the exact timing of the beginning of each symbol is not known, the receiver cannot be reliably removed the guard interval and correctly acquire individual symbols before computing the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) of their samples. In this case, inter-symbol interference occurs. Moreover, even a small time-domain misalignment of the FFT window results in an evolving phase shift in the frequency-domain symbols, leading to BER degradation. Yet another concern issue is the difference between the sampling rate of the receiver and that of the transmitter. This sampling rate offset results in a rotation of the 2m-ary constellation from symbol to symbol.
Many techniques dealing with the frequency offset estimation have been previously proposed for OFDM systems. Nevertheless, fewer works lend themselves readily to timing and phase compensation suitable for integrated circuit implementation. In order to achieve rapid acquisition and accurate tracking, there is a need to particularly address the timing offset in the lock transient of local oscillators.